May 19, 1991

CHILDREN'S BOOKS; A Drape of One's Own

By WENDY LESSER

NURSE LUGTON'S CURTAIN
By Virginia Woolf. Illustrated by Julie Vivas.

read "Nurse Lugton's Curtain" to a 6-year-old (well, nearly 6) and he said, "It has nice pictures, I like
the words, and it's a good story." So, for the generation it's primarily aimed at, this version of Virginia Woolf's fragmentary tale, elaborately illustrated with watercolors by Julie Vivas, would seem
to be a success.

The publisher's age guideline says "7 and up," however, and for those of us on the higher end of that scale, "Nurse Lugton's Curtain" may remind us all too strongly of what is least likable about
the author. There is a certain element of forced whimsy in this tale of a piece of material, in the process of being made into a curtain for Mrs. John Jasper Gingham's drawing-room window, covered with the figures
of animals who come to life when the seamstress falls asleep.

The imagery is self-congratulatory ("Over them burnt Nurse Lugton's golden thimble like a sun") or else nonexistent ("Really, it was a beautiful sight"). The imaginary town in which the animals come
to life is called, with Woolfian excess, Millamarchmantopolis; and it is apparently ruled by a great ogress called Lugton who has all these lovely creatures "in her toils." One can't help feeling, as so often
in Woolf's casual writings, overtones of class snobbery.

And I, knowing what I do of Woolf's childhood, pictured a couple of girls whose mother had died when they were young, terrorized by the servant who had been assigned the unpleasant responsibility of keeping them in order.
But none of this is in the story, unfortunately. We have to glean the terror from such casually dropped phrases as "Nobody harmed the lovely beasts; many pitied them." A child of 6, or even 10, will not ask to
know more about this pity, or this potential harm -- and perhaps the essence of a good children's story is that it leaves the mystery unexplained. But for an adult reader, this fragment is all too fragmentary.

The pictures themselves are very attractive, but I'm not sure they go with the book. That is, the story is extremely English -- from the nursemaid herself to the Waughian name of the town to the presence of Windsor chairs
and umbrellas and "figured blue stuff" -- whereas Julie Vivas's illustrations have a much wilder feel, of wide-open spaces and back-country existence, and she substitutes an ordinary wooden side-chair. This
fits the artist's Australian origins, and it might almost fit the imaginary (that is, definitely not of urban London) side of the fantasy, except that even Woolf's whimsy is civilized, conventional and not wild
at all. It is almost as if Maurice Sendak had been commissioned to illustrate some Victorian guide to good behavior in the young: the pictures say one thing, the words say entirely another.

But I shouldn't let my irritation at Woolf's prissiness overcome what can clearly be an amusing story for the right audience. Young readers old enough to read "Nurse Lugton's Curtain" to themselves
may be a bit taken aback by the number of semicolons; still, it's never too early to introduce a child to advanced punctuation.

And who am I to challenge the judgment of my youthful expert in children's literature? Our different reactions might just mean that the less you know about the author, the more you'll like this particular book. Perhaps
that's true of Virginia Woolf in general, which is why the Bloomsbury industry has not -- at least for her -- been an entirely good thing.

Wendy Lesser is the author of "His Other Half: Men Looking
at Women Through Art."